PFI Design Tutorial Series: Print-Ready Raised UV
Have you tried adding Raised UV as a print embellishment on your business cards or presentation folders? In Pt. 1 of our new design tutorial series, we explain the benefits Raised UV can provide, and how to best setup & create artwork files for this specialty print enhancement. Follow along to the video and our step-by-step breakdown below:
1. Go to https://presentationfolder.com/ to download a template for your Rais file. In our tutorial, we will be designing a Raised UV file for a presentation folder.
2. On the website's menu, head to the "Resources" tab on the right-hand side and click the arrow to drop down all the options. Choose: Templates, then, Raised UV Textures.
3. Choose a texture template to start (The Parquet Texture is used in the tutorial) by clicking: Download Template, underneath the Parquet Texture option.
4. Your download will open in a new window, but be sure to save to your desktop or wherever you will be accessing your project files.
5. Once you have saved the template, reopen in Adobe Illustrator.
6. Review your template by going to the right-hand bar, Layers, tab. You will see one of the layers is a magenta folder titled "Raised UV." The magenta layer helps keep all raised UV elements organized, visually distinguishes between the raised UV portions of the artwork. When the file goes to print, the machine will identify the layers and print accordingly.
7. You can remove the parquet texture from your template, start from scratch and add your own raised UV design elements. (For purposes of this tutorial, we go ahead and delete the texture to create our design)
8. Import your artwork elements to your template. In this tutorial, we use our "Soda Bottle" folder artwork.
9. Before you begin on marking the artwork, be sure to have the "Raised UV" Layer folder clicked on the right-hand side, while you work. You will be creating new layers under the "Raised UV" Layer folder as you design.
10. As you will see in the tutorial, we use the PEN TOOL (left click to lay down points) to outline (no fill) the soda bottles' contours. Every time you click down, you add a new anchor point to your layer, connecting each line and point you create. The more anchor points, the more details you can get. The editing process involves deleting or adding anchor points, depending on how precise you are. You want the lines to be as tight and clean as possible to create a full vector.
11. Once you have created your shape, reverse the stroke's color, so we have a white fill, then switch to magenta under your layer, and you have your first raised UV layer. (In the tutorial we repeat step 10 on all three soda bottles)
12. Once you have all of your shapes completed, check to be sure they are all appropriately stored in the magenta raised UV folder. Toggle the eye icon on/off, to make sure they are all linked.
13. SAVE YOUR FILE. We accept many file forms, see here. We suggest either an Adobe Illustrator (AI) or a print-ready PDF file.
Visit our site to learn more!
https://presentationfolder.com/
http://blog.presentationfolder.com/